Now they met face to face. In the course of the debate, under pressure from his opponent, Luther caused a sensation by his assertion that many of the views of Hus, the Bohemian heretic who had been burned at the stake in , were "very Christian and evangelical. The debate marks an important phase in Luther's development. By making him face the implications of the positions he had taken, it showed more clearly than before how far he had come from orthodoxy.
The breach with Rome was widening. It was not long before it became final. In June , a papal bull against Luther was formally prepared.
He was given sixty days in which to recant before being publicly condemned. In reply, he not only wrote a tract condemning the bull as the work of Antichrist but, on December 20, , in the presence of a crowd of students and teachers from the university, committed to the flames both the bull itself and the canon law.
It was clear that the break was complete. The burning of the bull, however, simply ratified what had been true for some time previously. His writings in , especially his Babylonian Captivity of the Church, in its full-scale attack on the Roman sacramental system, show that Luther had cast off all connection with that church.
In his Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, another of his writings of , Luther expounded his idea that every Christian is a priest. This does not imply the abolition of the clergy, but it does mean that every individual Christian can, and must, go directly to God in faith.
It also means that the "spiritual estate," or clergy, has no superiority over the "temporal estate," but that each Christian serves God in his calling. The earthly calling, therefore, becomes a means of Divine Service and is sanctified. Luther had also been teaching for some time, in accordance with the doctrine of justification by faith, that monastic vows, considered as good works, were worthless.
In response to these teachings, many monks and nuns left their cloisters and entered the world. Many of them got married; one of them, in fact, married Martin Luther. Luther replaced the ideal of celibacy with the ideal of the Christian home and of the family as the milieu in which to serve God.
He exemplified this ideal in his own life as a devoted husband and a loving father to his several children by his wife, the former Katharina von Bora, whom he married in In October the young emperor Charles V was crowned at Aachen. Early in his first Imperial Diet met at Worms, and Luther was invited to appear there for a hearing of his case. Charles had promised the electors, as a condition of his election, that no subject would be condemned without a hearing.
On April 17 and 18, Luther appeared before the assembled dignitaries of the empire, many of whom were his sympathizers, to defend his writings. Asked whether he was willing to stand by what he had written, he stood firm on what he had said. He has been quoted for centuries as having concluded with the words, "Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise. Since it proved impossible to shake Luther from his position, he left Worms a few days later.
On the way home, he was "kidnapped" by some of Frederick the Wise's men and taken for his own safety to the Wartburg, a castle belonging to the elector. At the diet, after many members had departed, including Frederick and other sympathizers of Luther, the remaining members at Charles's initiative issued the Edict of Worms, condemning Luther and making him an outlaw.
An outlaw he remained for the rest of his life. Although the edict was impossible to enforce, it was important because it forced the followers of Luther to become rebels against the emperor, much as Luther deplored any resistance to constituted authority. It was during his stay in the Wartburg that Luther began one of his most important undertakings, the translation of the Bible into German.
Using Erasmus's Greek text as the basis for his work, he translated the entire New Testament, which was published in During the next few years he was to translate the Old Testament from Hebrew, publishing the entire text of his German Bible in For Luther, the Bible was the sole authority in matters of faith, and he had already declared that each Christian should be able to go to the Scriptures for himself.
Therefore, the text should be available in the native tongue for those who could read no Latin. Luther was convinced that he had unlocked the meaning of the Bible after years of popish darkness; he was to be shocked as he found how many differing interpretations his contemporaries would extract from the sacred text.
Luther's Bible, in addition to its religious importance, was a literary masterpiece and did more than any other work to create the modern German literary language. After his return in to Wittenberg, which was to remain his home for the rest of his life, Luther devoted himself to building his church. He never approved of the word Lutheran or claimed to be founding a church; this had been done once and for all by Jesus, and Luther saw himself as a reformer or restorer.
He revised the services of the church, substituting the vernacular for Latin and emphasizing the congregational singing of hymns; he loved music above almost everything else. His service was too conservative, too close to the Catholic form to satisfy some of his followers. He produced catechisms for the instruction of the young, and he was among the first to advocate free public education, in order that all might be able to read the Bible.
In matters of liturgy he was indifferent, permitting wide variations. One of his problems in the s was the outbreak of revolutionary risings, which he feared would be attributed to his influence. The first was that of the imperial knights in Two of the leaders of the knights were Franz von Sickingen and Ulrich von Hutten, who were both attracted to Luther's teachings. The rising failed; Sickingen was killed; and Hutten, fatally ill, fled to Switzerland, where his short and tragic life ended in Luther had nothing to do with the rising; indeed, he was unalterably opposed to any kind of revolutionary violence and desperately anxious to keep his movement free from any connection with such activity.
He regarded the secular authority as divinely ordained to punish the wicked and protect the good, and, therefore, urged obedience to it. If it commanded anything against the law of God in practice, this meant, for instance, if it commanded a person to give up his faith it would not be obeyed, but it must not be resisted. In other words, better martyrdom than resistance.
The discontent of the peasants broke out once more in the great Peasants' Revolt of 25, which was a crisis for all Germany. The unrest that had long existed among the peasantry was aggravated by the rising cost of living, the monopolistic practices of the hated merchant class, and the use of the revived Roman law to increase the power of the lords over their peasants.
Serfdom had long been felt to be an abuse, and it is not surprising that Luther's teachings about Christian liberty were interpreted misinterpreted, according to him to supply a warrant for the peasants' demand for freedom.
The revolt began in the late summer of , and its main centers came to be Swabia, Franconia, and Thuringia. The demands of the peasants reflected economic, social, and religious discontent. The Swabian peasants, for example, refused to pay tithes, threatened death to some of their priests, and practically abolished confession.
He combined apocalyptic religious ideas with a predilection for radical social change. Not only did he claim to possess direct revelations from the Holy Spirit, but he also preached violence against the nobility and proposed as his ideal a regime of absolute communistic equality. Under his leadership many peasants took arms against their lords, while the nobles, finding themselves threatened, combined to crush the rebels.
After retracting his errors, he was executed. Elsewhere there were also acts of violence by the peasants: destruction, pillaging, sacrilege, even massacres. Eventually, however, all the risings were suppressed with great cruelty. In the final outcome, nothing was done to alleviate the lot of the peasants or to redress their grievances; in fact, their conditions were made worse.
In these events Luther found himself involved whether he wanted to be or not. Some of his writings had given rise to the expectation that he would sympathize with the rebels. In a group of Swabian peasants drew up a set of "Twelve Articles" formulating their demands. They included the abolition of serfdom and the alleviation of feudal burdens.
Copies were sent to persons chosen by the peasants as qualified to be arbiters of their cause; Luther was one of these. In response he wrote his Admonition to Peace in which he disclaimed responsibility for the rising; condemned the lords for their oppression, which had brought about the revolt; and admonished the peasants that nothing, not even the wickedness of their rulers, gave them the right to rebel. They were threatening to quench his gospel by acting contrary to it though in its name.
He rejected the demand for the abolition of serfdom on the ground that Christian liberty is not an external thing, and that to throw off serfdom would deprive the lords of their property. Luther personally traveled among the disaffected peasants at some risk to himself, hoping to restore peace by persuasion, but found it impossible. He therefore concluded that force would be necessary to suppress the disorders.
A harsh and cruel tone appears in his comments on the revolt, most of all in his little tract, Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants, in which he urged that the rebels should be cut down like mad dogs. When the lords got the upper hand, however, and were mercilessly slaughtering the peasants far beyond the requirements of safety, Luther pleaded for mercy and condemned the cruelty of the lords. However, he was no longer a hero to the peasants as he had been, and many of them turned to more radical religious sects.
At about the same time came the final break between Luther and Erasmus. At first Erasmus had asked for a fair hearing for Luther and had interceded with Charles V on his behalf. Luther, for his part, at first treated Erasmus with great respect. As time passed, it became clear to both men that they differed in basic ways.
For Erasmus, the Lutheran movement brought tumult and disorder; for Luther, Erasmus was too timid, holding back when he should have joined the cause of the Gospel against Rome. Luther felt that Erasmus laughed at things that should make men lament.
With Luther's deep sense of sin and the corruption of human nature, he could never accept the humanistic faith in man's capacity for moral improvement.
Erasmus was under continual pressure from the Catholic side to come out publicly against Luther. Eventually he yielded, publishing A Discourse on Free Will in He chose a point on which there was a profound gap between the humanist view of man and his destiny, and that of Luther and his followers. Erasmus defended the ability of man, through his own efforts, to contribute to his salvation. In the following year Luther answered with his The Bondage of the Will. He contended that the will is free to fulfill the civil or moral law, but is helpless when it comes to the task of fulfilling God's righteousness.
It cannot, without divine grace, turn from sin to God or choose between God and Satan. Toward Erasmus he expressed himself very harshly, denying him the name of theologian. Erasmus, hurt by Luther's tone, answered; and Luther in turn replied just as uncivilly as before.
The break between them was complete, though Erasmus may always have cherished the hope for an eventual reunion of the warring factions within Christendom. Luther, for his part, was not charitable or even courteous to those who disagreed with him; over the years his disposition became, if anything, even worse. At about the same time as the split with Erasmus came the break between the Lutheran and Zwinglian branches of the Reformation. It was on the doctrine of the Eucharist, or Lord's Supper, that the two men differed most clearly.
Luther, though he rejected the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, still believed in the Real Presence of the body and blood of Christ along with the bread and wine, while Zwingli had taken the far more radical position that the bread and wine only signified the body and blood, which were not actually present.
In Luther, Zwingli, their chief lieutenants, and other reformers, met at Marburg in the territory of Landgrave Philip of Hesse, who had arranged the meeting.
Philip was a Lutheran prince, who foresaw the possibility of military attack by Catholic forces and sought to unite for defensive purposes those territories in Germany that followed Luther with those parts of Switzerland that had adopted the teachings of Zwingli. No defensive alliance was possible without a confessional agreement, which Philip hoped to secure by this meeting, the Marburg Colloquy, as it is generally called.
Philip's hopes were disappointed, however, and the conference succeeded only in showing that an accommodation was impossible. The explanation has often been sought in Luther's intransigence, and this may have been the chief obstacle. However, it has also been suggested that the responsibility must lie with Luther's chief adviser and colleague, Philip Melanchthon, who was anxious to leave the road open for reconciliation with the Catholics and, therefore, persuaded Luther to abandon the Zwinglians.
In any case, Luther always spoke with great bitterness about Zwingli and his followers, whom he called Sacramentarians. Though Luther might deplore the intrusion of politics into his movement, he could not prevent it. Many German princes led their states into the new church, and most of the imperial free cities did likewise.
Some bishoprics also were "secularized," that is, lost to the Catholic church. The religious issue became a regular feature of the diets, and the Lutheran members more and more took on the character of a political party. The emperor, though firmly committed to upholding the old faith, was severely restricted not only by the inadequate forces at his disposal but also by the distracting effect of his numerous problems outside Germany.
Conflicts with the French and the Turks compelled him to seek the help of the German Lutherans against these external enemies, and this help could only be purchased by a policy of toleration. At the Diet of Speyer of , the final decree or Recess in effect left the Lutheran members free to pursue their own religious policy.
When the diet met in , again at Speyer, the Catholic party was dominant, and the Recess was much more unfavorable to the Lutherans. The new doctrines were not to be allowed to spread until the meeting of a church council such a council had been long called for by both sides and until Catholics in territories that had broken from Rome were fully tolerated. On the other hand, Lutherans in Catholic territories were to be put to death.
The Lutherans were impelled to issue a Protest, from which they were called Protestants. This is the first use of the word as a designation of non-Roman Christians. In , when the diet met at Augsburg, Charles was in a strong position. The Sack of Rome in had increased his influence with the pope and strengthened his growing hold in Italy. In the Turks had been repelled in an attempt to take Vienna, and in the same year the Treaty of Cambrai with France brought temporary peace with the old enemy on terms favorable to Charles.
In Charles was crowned emperor in Bologna by the pope. He came to the diet the first he had attended personally since Worms in determined to settle the religious question once and for all. Luther, as an outlaw, could not be there; he stayed at the castle of Coburg, in constant touch with Melanchthon, who was charged with presenting the Lutheran position. This position was embodied in what has become known as the Augsburg Confession, still recognized today as the most authoritative statement of the Lutheran faith.
Melanchthon, anxious as always for reconciliation with the old church, made as many concessions as he could enough to worry Luther but the Confession was still rejected by the Catholics.
Instead, the diet gave the Protestants until April 15, , to submit. Otherwise Charles would use force against them. In this dangerous situation, a Lutheran League for defensive purposes was brought into being.
It was formed in at the town of Schmalkalden, by six princes and ten free cities; other states joined later. Charles V, still distracted by foreign problems and in need of Protestant help, was unable for several years to fulfill his threats. The German Protestants turned to the French for assistance, and in this way there began a French policy of support for foreign Protestants, which was to last until the reign of Louis XIV.
Meanwhile, an attempt was made in Germany to settle the religious problem by a series of conferences between the opposing groups in and In spite of much good will and sincere efforts on both sides, the attempt failed; probably it was from this time that war was inevitable.
In the years around , the Lutheran cause was weakened morally and politically by one of its strongest defenders, Philip of Hesse, as a result of Philip's bigamy in He had consulted Luther, who advised this step on the grounds that bigamy was better than divorce, but counseled secrecy. The news got out, however, putting Philip in a very difficult position, because bigamy under imperial law was a capital offense. Philip had to seek the emperor's pardon, which was granted in at the price of a treaty that made Philip the emperor's ally, though this alliance proved to be only temporary.
Luther's reputation also suffered when it became known that he had given Philip advice to commit bigamy. Luther by no means meant this to set a precedent; he regarded himself as a confessor seeking a way out of a difficult situation. From an early date Luther had felt compelled to rely on the rulers and governing classes for support of his church and movement.
It is quite possible that these dominant forces in German life would have taken charge of the cause whether or not he had wished it. It is, however, a great exaggeration to make Luther responsible, at least in part, for absolutism and even the totalitarian state. He never believed in the unrestricted authority of the state in religious matters.
In fact, he felt very strongly that in matters of conscience and in matters affecting the soul, the temporal power had no right to interfere; its jurisdiction extended only to external things, such as keeping order. On the other hand, as he grew older, he tended to become more harsh and to include religious dissent under the heading of sedition, which he thought deserved the extreme penalty.
He was presented with a pile of books and was asked whether they were his and whether he would retract what he had written. The events at Worms propelled his message far beyond those concerned with theology and the reform of the German church. His defiance of the emperor and of the secular and ecclesiastical estates of the Empire became, even during his own lifetime, legendary. It made him into a hero. Printed images of the reformer began to circulate, satisfying popular curiosity regarding the appearance of this remarkable rebel.
Luther often carried a Bible in these portraits; in some he was also shown accompanied by the dove of the Holy Spirit, testifying to his divine inspiration. In a woodcut by the Strasbourg artist Hans Baldung Grien, Luther not only has a dove but also a halo. See Bob Scribner on visual representations of Luther.
This incipient cult was given further impetus by his appearance and actions at the Diet of Worms. No other evangelical confession celebrated its founder in such hagiographical terms and the image of Luther as a German hero that emerged during the s remained an important part of German Protestantism into the 20th century.
Luther left Worms on April 26th, See Andrew Pettegree on the perils Luther faced. He was taken to the Wartburg castle in Eisenach. For Luther, this was a productive, though physically and spiritually traumatic, period, during which he produced two important works: On Monastic Vows , his final rejection of his former life as a friar, and his German translation of the New Testament, which was first published in Wittenberg in September Such mandates were to play a crucial role in the institutionalisation of the Reformation throughout Protestant Germany and beyond.
Frederick the Wise was in a precarious political position, under immediate threat from his cousin, the Catholic Duke George of Saxony, who was determined to execute the imperial edict against Luther, who had returned to Wittenberg in March In what subsequently proved to be a typical piece of politicking, Luther aligned himself not with Karlstadt but with the Saxon elector.
The pace of reform must, Luther argued, be gradual. As Luther accommodated himself, and his movement, to political realities, he made Karlstadt, formerly an ally, into a scapegoat for the radicalism of Martin Luther died on February 18th, In members of the Schmalkaldic League, a group of Lutheran princes and cities led by Elector John Frederick of Saxony and Landgrave Philip I of Hesse, fought to defend their religious and political independence against Emperor Charles V, newly returned from his lengthy wars in Italy.
The settlement proved impossible to enforce: Lutheranism was already too entrenched to eliminate and in the Peace of Augsburg granted it legal recognition within the Empire. Moreover, Catholicism gradually, thanks in part to Trent and in part to the work of the Jesuits, reasserted its presence in the Empire: key territories, notably Bavaria, reaffirmed Catholic doctrine and practice.
With his Ninety-Five Theses , and with his subsequent writings, Luther unleashed a set of ideas that led, ultimately, to the permanent splintering of western Christendom recent attempts at doctrinal reconciliation notwithstanding. Late medieval calls for reform were important in setting the scene, but there can be no doubt that Luther himself had an epoch-making significance.
He showed that one individual could, through invoking the authority of scripture, successfully challenge the power of the papacy. What followed this revelation was not, however, religious freedom or a shift towards liberty of conscience. Indeed, mainstream Protestantism was as intolerant of religious diversity as Catholicism.
Early modern statements of faith — the Augsburg Confession, the decrees of the Council of Trent, the Westminster Confession of , to name but a few — defined doctrinal orthodoxy and laid down guidelines for the organisation of churches. Throughout Europe, orthodoxies — Protestant and Catholic — were enforced through education and, where necessary, through persecution.
Luther had unwittingly inaugurated a confessional age, during which Europe was divided into distinct religious groupings. Individual voices advocated toleration and in parts of Europe — particularly Germany and the Dutch Republic — ordinary people did learn to live with religious diversity, co-existing in mixed-confession communities. But the rise of religious toleration was a painfully slow process, one that is still far from complete today. Nothing, however, could contain his ideas. Yet the reform of 16th-century religious life was driven forward by a huge variety of individuals, ideas and events.
The early modern period witnessed not one Reformation, but many. Catholicism — both medieval and early modern — was by no means uniform in its beliefs and practices, yet its diversity was nothing compared to that of Protestantism.
There were key theological differences between Luther and the Swiss reformers, the most important of whom were Zwingli and Heinrich Bullinger in Zurich, and Johannes Oecolampadius in Basel. They also held different views regarding the nature and pace of reform. In the parts of the Swiss Confederation and southern Germany that followed the Reformed teaching of Zwingli and his successors, churches were stripped of images, liturgy was simplified and moral and social discipline was policed through the creation of courts.
The urban Reformations in Switzerland and southern Germany were propelled, in many cases, by popular support for evangelical ideas. Artisans and guild folk proved receptive to preaching and to printed polemic, which criticised the hierarchies of the Roman church and their financial exploitation of the laity and that emphasized spiritual freedom and equality. Iconoclasm was one of the ways in which they made their views felt.
For urban magistrates, as for princely rulers, the decision to adopt religious reform was made in part because of the need to maintain order. This property included not only land and money, but also legal rights and privileges. To introduce the Reformation — whether in its Lutheran or Reformed manifestation — was to bring the church, its material goods, its traditional immunities and its control of education and charity under the control of the secular authorities.
Eventually, these Protestant churches became parts of the administrative apparatus of their cities and territories. Pastors became, in effect, civil servants, responsible not only for preaching but also for public order and morality, for social welfare and for overseeing educational systems that enforced confessional orthodoxy. Ultimately, state protection enabled the Lutheran and Swiss Reformations to survive and to flourish.
Right from the start, however, there were individuals and groups who were inspired by the evangelical message, but who refused to accommodate themselves to the exigencies of early modern social and political life, with its emphasis on conformity and order.
It confirmed for Luther and for others that religious radicalism would serve as the harbinger of social rebellion and violence. The key ideas of the Reformation—a call to purify the church and a belief that the Bible, not tradition, should be the sole source of spiritual authority—were not themselves novel.
However, Luther and the other reformers became the first to skillfully use the power of the printing press to give their ideas a wide audience. Although he had hoped to spur renewal from within the church, in he was summoned before the Diet of Worms and excommunicated.
Sheltered by Friedrich, elector of Saxony, Luther translated the Bible into German and continued his output of vernacular pamphlets. The result was a theocratic regime of enforced, austere morality. Beginning in , every parish was required to have a copy. The Catholic Church was slow to respond systematically to the theological and publicity innovations of Luther and the other reformers.
The Catholic Church of the Counter-Reformation era grew more spiritual, more literate and more educated. New religious orders, notably the Jesuits, combined rigorous spirituality with a globally minded intellectualism, while mystics such as Teresa of Avila injected new passion into the older orders.
Inquisitions, both in Spain and in Rome, were reorganized to fight the threat of Protestant heresy. Along with the religious consequences of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation came deep and lasting political changes. Bach, the baroque altarpieces of Pieter Paul Rubens and even the capitalism of Dutch Calvinist merchants. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present.
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